Chapter 13

THE DOMESTIC SPIRE

WHEN the British authorities, exactly four centuries ago, set themselves to arrest the alarming denudation and destruction of the English forests, they little dreamed that they were introducing a new era in national life and manners. Until then, wood had been the popular fuel. They ordained that, in future, coal must be used. But the general change from wood to coal meant that every dwelling, however humble, must have a chimney. Until then, chimneys had been the monopoly of a privileged few; from that moment they became universal.

Through all the earlier stages of English life, warmth and comfort were derived from fires that blazed in the centre of the apartment, the smoke-made as fragrant or at least as malodorous as possible by the use of appropriate woods — escaping through such apertures as it could find. Even in royal palaces, baronial halls, and manor houses, such braziers burned. It was in the smoke of one of these braziers, in King Eadwine’s great hall in Northumbria, that the sparrow fluttered in confusion, providing Paulinus with a dramatic illustration as he pleaded with the sovereign for the introduction of Christianity. It was into a similar brazier at the Guildhall that, in the presence of Henry the Fifth, Sir Richard Whittington tossed the documents that proved His Majesty’s enormous financial obligations to himself. A similar scene marks the climax of Thackeray’s Esmond.

We are never tired of singing the praises of Benjamin Franklin for inventing the lightning-rod which brings the venom of the angry skies down the outside of the chimney to the ground. But what of the man who devised a way of conveying the fumes of the fire and the suffocating smoke up inside of the chimney to the open air above? A man could exist, and find pleasure in living, before lightning-rods were introduced; but one can scarcely repress a shudder as he thinks of the days before chimneys came in. Old Raphael Holinshed, the quaint Elizabethan chronicler, paints a graphic picture of an evening in the home of his childhood, the guests scarcely visible to each other through the haze, and the conversation punctuated by incessant coughing. With the appearance of the chimney, social and domestic life was regenerated. Fire-side pleasures became the delight of every cottage. The chimney corner became the most potent spot in England. There, when the hard day’s work was finished, neighbours met and grappled with the problems of Church and State in really noble fashion.

The chimney comer had a national value. None of your gossip and chatter and funny stories! The conclave was as solemn as a senate; and many a budding village Hampden, listening open-eyed to the furious debate that took place there, imbibed principles that afterwards prompted him to fame. Moreover, in those quiet old days, before newspapers and railway trains and telegrams had burst upon mankind, the social influence of the chimney comer was worth something. The music, the recitals, the games, the fun and frolic incidental to the unhurried intercourse of happy people, were worth to the nation more than any tongue can tell.

Moreover, the chimney introduced a new age in architecture. In one of his charming essays on English country life, Richard Jefferies points out that the old-fashioned cottages are all built around the chimney. ‘The chimney,’ he says, ‘is the firm nucleus of solid masonry about which the low walls of rubble are clustered; when the cottage is destroyed, the chimney remains; and, against the chimney, it is built up again.’ After a conflagration, everything else is a heap of charred ruins. The twisted leg of a metal bedstead and the battered remnants of an iron stove peep piteously out from the general wreckage. But the chimney stands serene and unaffected as if it had not even heard that a fire had occurred in the locality. It is the national emblem of constancy, of fidelity, of the friendship that holds on when ail else goes.

It is the symbol of the things that abide, the things over which storm and flame and tempest have no power. Who that has entered any great city by train has not been arrested by the spectacle of an interminable forest of chimney-pots? They impress him as the outward and visible evidence of those embedded masses of humanity that make up the city’s life and industry and emotion. Concerning those chimney-pots, Longfellow has a dainty little poem:

Each man’s chimney is his Golden Milestone,
Is the central point from which he measures every distance
Through the gateways of the world around him.

In her Roadmender, Michael Fairless tells of an old man, dying in a wretched London garret, who had just been visited by a local clergyman. ‘He said as W there’s golden streets yonder,’ the sick man confided to Michael Fairless. ‘I ain’t perticler wot the streets is made of, but it’ll seem homely-like if there’s plenty of chimleys there!’ The sun,’ Michael Fairless adds, ‘stretched a sudden finger, painting the chimney-pots red and gold against the smoke-dimmed sky; and, in that burst of radiance, the old man passed away.’ In the light of that revealing and suggestive episode, the countless chimney-pots look like so many spires pointing the dwellers in the homes beneath to the skies above. They seem to know that, whilst they themselves can carry off something of the smoke that is generated below, the real happiness of the lives over which they stand sentinel depends on the degree to which those lives are enriched by the grace and favour of heaven itself.

​Dr. F. W. Boreham